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N033-E3 Tier 3 · Intermediate · easy ecommerce · Brightlane

Return the month number for the timestamp `'2024-08-22 09:15:00'`

Part of Date Truncation and Extraction in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's billing system routes transactions to the correct monthly processing bucket based on the month number of the transaction timestamp.

Write a query to return the month number for the timestamp '2024-08-22 09:15:00'.

Output:

  • A single row with one column, month_number, containing the month as a number.
Schema · ecommerce 5 tables
categories
id integer
name text
parent_id? integer
products
id integer
name text
category_id integer
price numeric
stock_qty integer
attributes? jsonb
order_items
id integer
order_id integer
product_id integer
quantity integer
unit_price numeric
customers
id integer
name text
email text
city? text
country text
created_at timestamptz
is_active boolean
orders
id integer
customer_id integer
ordered_at timestamptz
status text
total_amount numeric
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Solution query
SELECT
  EXTRACT(
    MONTH
    FROM
      '2024-08-22 09:15:00'::TIMESTAMP
  ) AS month_number

The shape

EXTRACT(month FROM ...) pulls the month number out of a datetime and returns a value between 1 and 12. The August timestamp returns 8, which the billing system routes to the eighth monthly processing bucket.

Clause by clause

  • SELECT EXTRACT(month FROM '2024-08-22 09:15:00'::timestamp) evaluates the extraction against a single literal. The ::timestamp cast resolves the string as a timezone-naive datetime. The month component is the same whether the input is a date, a timestamp, or a timestamptz, so the cast choice doesn't affect the value, only the input type.
  • AS month_number labels the result as the bucket number the routing system reads.

The trap

The returned value carries no year. EXTRACT(month FROM '2024-08-22') and EXTRACT(month FROM '2023-08-22') both return 8. For a routing decision that already lives inside a single billing period this is exactly the right answer, but the same expression on a multi-year dataset collapses August 2023 and August 2024 into the same number. Knowing the value is decoupled from the year is what tells a reader whether the expression is being used for a within-period decision or whether it is silently dropping the year dimension.

You practiced EXTRACT(month FROM ...) — pull the month number (1–12) out of a datetime, with no year attached to the result.

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